PRESIDENT MCKINLEY
has been struck down by another of the almost nameless neophytes of the modern
murder-sect at the Pan-American Exhibition, and upon the very morrow of the
most important speech delivered by any American President since Lincoln. The
circumstances are likely to leave their indelible mark, not only upon the imagination
of mankind, but upon the actual destinies of America and the world. The political
assassinations which have been the moral portent of our time, reduce the crimes
of a Ravaillac or an Ankerstroem, by comparison, to the character of spasmodic
and meaningless eccentricity.
In the long series of tragedies during the last
few decades, there is developing, more and more, a sense of sinister process,
of something obscure and appalling in the characteristics of an era of civilisation,
such as may well exert upon the historic mind of the distant future the fascination
that belongs to strange and temporary forms of evil. The human spirit of an
epoch has its maladies like the individual body. Anarchist murder is not a conspiracy.
It is a contagion. Methods of police can always break the backbone of an organisation,
but they can no more grapple alone with the infection of perverted thought and
sinister example, than smallpox can be fought with a bludgeon. We are no longer
in presence, at long intervals, of erratic impulses like those of former assassins
of rulers, from Ravaillac or Ankerstroem to Wilkes Booth and Guiteau. We have
to deal with a disease of society as typical of something in the moral state
of a period as the poison-system of a Lucrezia or a Brinvilliers. Henceforth
the acceptance of conspicuous rulership in the civilised countries must be accounted
a braver thing than exposure in battle, and every great public appearance of
crowned head or Republican President a risk worthy of the Victoria Cross.
It seems but yesterday that Mr. McKinley was reproached
for the pomp and circumstance of his second installation—though all [555][556]
democracies, as a matter of fact, prefer pomp to plainness—and was attacked
with unhappy and absurd exaggeration as the Republican “Emperor.” The truth
is that a more typical American citizen, in the best use of the term, never
held the chief magistracy of the United States, and that he has died an open
sacrifice to the traditional publicity, geniality and simpleness of presidential
intercourse with the people. The influence of no statesman has ever been more
powerful in death, and no crime in the previous records of political murder
could compare in international significance with this. The effect of other assassinations,
for all main purposes, has been null or negative. Lincoln’s fate shut the complete
book. Garfield’s career stopped at the title page. Though the intended constitution
perished with the Tsar when the Emperor Alexander was killed, the consequences
in this case, as in the rest, were internal. But Mr. McKinley has disappeared
just as he had marked out the inevitable lines of American political development
precisely with reference to the future relations of the United States with the
remainder of the globe. He had declared, with a persuasiveness that no other
man in America could at that moment have approached, the policy which he would
have carried out if he had been spared. His death at Buffalo has given unexampled
authority and impressiveness to the Buffalo programme. His last speech has become
a national legacy. In this sense the career of his successor must be the complement
of his own, and Mr. McKinley, unlike any other American President, and to a
degree for which it would not be easy to find a parallel in the modern affairs
of any country, has bequeathed a complete scheme of predetermined action to
an executor who is the very embodiment of the new ideas, and can hardly fail
to show himself an even more decisive and thorough exponent of the Buffalo programme
than its author would have proved.
It has been inevitably said that William McKinley
was not great as Washington and Lincoln, or even as some others between and
after, were great. But it would be irrelevant to emphasise the inevitable. The
important point is that if he was less memorable as a man he was not less memorable
as President. Fundamentally sound in ability and character and full of homely
excellence, he was as completely the apt representative figure of his own epoch
as were even the founder and the saviour of the Republic of theirs. A consummate
interpreter rather than a leader of public opinion and justly accused of “keeping
his ear to the ground” with too assiduous an anxiety, he was nevertheless an
opportunist chiefly in the sense that he was a most careful and sagacious judge
of opportunity. But in this respect the opportunism of Pitt or Peel, of Beaconsfield
or Gladstone, involved a far wider range of inconsistency.